This paper investigates how HIV/AIDS has impacted the labor market in South Africa, focusing on its effect on wages and employment. This is done by matching individual level data with group specific cumulative AIDS mortality rates. Exploiting the panel nature of the data, I remove individuals...

This paper estimates, using a large panel data set from rural Bangladesh, the effects of health shocks on household consumption and how access to microcredit affects households’ response to such shocks. Households appear to be fairly well insured against health shocks. Our results suggest that...

Finding an efficient method for sampling micro- and small-enterprises (MSEs) for research and statistical reporting purposes is a challenge in developing countries, where registries of MSEs are often nonexistent or outdated. This lack of a sampling frame creates an obstacle in finding a...

This paper studies the microeconomic impacts of the political crisis and civil conflict that immediately followed the December 2007 presidential election in Kenya. Income, expenditures, and consumption dramatically declined for a broad segment of the rural population for the duration of the...

No previous study has estimated the effect of intrauterine exposure to armed conflict on pregnancy outcomes. Drawing on data from the 2004 Palestinian Demographic and Health Survey, which was conducted approximately 4years after the start of the al-Aqsa Intifada, we find that an additional...

We examine the impact of removing user fees for healthcare in rural Ghana using data from a randomized experiment that includes rich information on objective measures of child health status. We find that free care increased use of formal healthcare shifting care seeking away from informal...

This paper studies changes over time in the incidence of labor tying. The existingliterature is successful in explaining the emergence of this institution, but contains thecounterfactual implication that there should be an increasing trend in labor tying. However,previous contributions have so...

Locating substantial parts of the production process in developing and emerging economies, many firms face an increasing demand by stakeholders for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) along their value chains. Contractual incompleteness between firms and their suppliers at different stages of...

With millions of women around the developing world thrown into self-employment but with low productivity, increasing the profitability of their businesses is highly relevant for poverty reduction and gender equity. This study evaluates the impacts of a BDS program serving female...

Persistently high youth unemployment is one of the most pressing problems in South Africa. We prospectively analyze an employer wage subsidy targeted at youth, a policy recently enacted by the South African government to address the issue. Recognizing that a credible estimate of the policy's...